Existentialism (/ɛɡzɪˈstɛnʃəlɪzəm/)[1] is a tradition of philosophical enquiry associated mainly with certain 19th and 20th-century European philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences,[2][3][4] shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.[5] While the predominant value of existentialist thought is commonly acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is authenticity;[6] in the view of the existentialist, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation, confusion, or dread in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.[7] Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.[8][9]

Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher,[2][10][11] though he did not use the term existentialism.[12] He proposed that each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely, or "authentically".[13][14] Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II, and strongly influenced many disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.[15]

The term is often seen as a historical convenience as it was first applied to many philosophers in hindsight, long after they had died; in fact, while existentialism is generally considered to have originated with Kierkegaard, the first prominent existentialist philosopher to adopt the term as a self-description was Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre posits the idea that "what all existentialists have in common is the fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence", as scholar Frederick Copleston explains.[16] According to philosopher Steven Crowell, defining existentialism has been relatively difficult, and he argues that it is better understood as a general approach used to reject certain systematic philosophies rather than as a systematic philosophy itself.[2] Sartre himself, in a lecture delivered in 1945, described existentialism as "the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism".[17]

Although many outside Scandinavia consider the term existentialism to have originated from Kierkegaard himself, it is more likely that Kierkegaard adopted this term (or at least the term "existential" as a description of his philosophy) from the Norwegian poet and literary critic Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven.[18] This assertion comes from two sources, the Norwegian philosopher Erik Lundestad refers to the Danish philosopher Fredrik Christian Sibbern. Sibbern is supposed to have had two conversations in 1841, the first with Welhaven and the second with Kierkegaard, it is in the first conversation that it is believed that Welhaven came up with "a word that he said covered a certain thinking, which had a close and positive attitude to life, a relationship he described as existential".[19] This was then brought to Kierkegaard by Sibbern.

The second claim comes from the Norwegian historian Rune Slagstad, who claims to prove that Kierkegaard himself said the term "existential" was borrowed from the poet, he strongly believes that it was Kierkegaard himself who said that "Hegelians do not study philosophy 'existentially'; to use a phrase by Welhaven from one time when I spoke with him about philosophy".[20]

Sartre claimed that a central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals—independently acting and responsible, conscious beings ("existence")—rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories the individuals fit ("essence"). The actual life of the individuals is what constitutes what could be called their "true essence" instead of there being an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them. Thus, human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life,[21] although it was Sartre who explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger, and Kierkegaard:

"The subjective thinker’s form, the form of his communication, is his style. His form must be just as manifold as are the opposites that he holds together, the systematic eins, zwei, drei is an abstract form that also must inevitably run into trouble whenever it is to be applied to the concrete. To the same degree as the subjective thinker is concrete, to the same degree his form must also be concretely dialectical, but just as he himself is not a poet, not an ethicist, not a dialectician, so also his form is none of these directly. His form must first and last be related to existence, and in this regard he must have at his disposal the poetic, the ethical, the dialectical, the religious. Subordinate character, setting, etc., which belong to the well-balanced character of the esthetic production, are in themselves breadth; the subjective thinker has only one setting—existence—and has nothing to do with localities and such things. The setting is not the fairyland of the imagination, where poetry produces consummation, nor is the setting laid in England, and historical accuracy is not a concern, the setting is inwardness in existing as a human being; the concretion is the relation of the existence-categories to one another. Historical accuracy and historical actuality are breadth." Søren Kierkegaard (Concluding Postscript, Hong pp. 357–58)

Some interpret the imperative to define oneself as meaning that anyone can wish to be anything. However, an existentialist philosopher would say such a wish constitutes an inauthentic existence - what Sartre would call 'bad faith'. Instead, the phrase should be taken to say that people are (1) defined only insofar as they act and (2) that they are responsible for their actions, for example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Furthermore, by this action of cruelty, such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (cruel persons), this is as opposed to their genes, or human nature, bearing the blame.

As Sartre writes in his work Existentialism is a Humanism: "... man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards". The more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: A person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since humans can choose to be either cruel or good, they are, in fact, neither of these things essentially.[22]

Sartre's definition of existentialism was based on Heidegger's magnum opus "Being and Time"; in a set of letters, Heidegger implies that Sartre misunderstood him for his own purposes of subjectivism, and that he did not mean that actions take precedence over being so long as those actions were not reflected upon. This way of living, Heidegger called "average everydayness".

The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it, this meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. This contrasts with the notion that "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person.[23]

It is in relation to the concept of the devastating awareness of meaninglessness that Albert Camus claimed that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" in his The Myth of Sisyphus, although "prescriptions" against the possibly deleterious consequences of these kinds of encounters vary, from Kierkegaard's religious "stage" to Camus' insistence on persevering in spite of absurdity, the concern with helping people avoid living their lives in ways that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything meaningful break down is common to most existentialist philosophers. The possibility of having everything meaningful break down poses a threat of quietism, which is inherently against the existentialist philosophy,[28] it has been said that the possibility of suicide makes all humans existentialists.[29]

Facticity is a concept defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness as the in-itself, which delineates for humans the modalities of being and not being, this can be more easily understood when considering facticity in relation to the temporal dimension of our past: one's past is what one is, in the sense that it co-constitutes oneself. However, to say that one is only one's past would be to ignore a significant part of reality (the present and the future), while saying that one's past is only what one was, would entirely detach it from oneself now. A denial of one's own concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and the same goes for all other kinds of facticity (having a human body — e.g., one that doesn't allow a person to run faster than the speed of sound — identity, values, etc.).[30]

Facticity is both a limitation and a condition of freedom, it is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity consists of things one couldn't have chosen (birthplace, etc.), but a condition of freedom in the sense that one's values most likely depend on it. However, even though one's facticity is "set in stone" (as being past, for instance), it cannot determine a person: The value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person, as an example, consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and the other who remembers everything. They both have committed many crimes, but the first man, knowing nothing about this, leads a rather normal life while the second man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for "trapping" him in this life. There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning to his past.

However, to disregard one's facticity when, in the continual process of self-making, one projects oneself into the future, that would be to put oneself in denial of oneself, and thus would be inauthentic; in other words, the origin of one's projection must still be one's facticity, though in the mode of not being it (essentially). An example of one focusing solely on one's possible projects without reflecting on one's current facticity:[30] if one continually thinks about future possibilities related to being rich (e.g. a better car, bigger house, better quality of life, etc.) without considering the facticity of not currently having the financial means to do so. In this example, considering both facticity and transcendence, an authentic mode of being would be considering future projects that might improve one's current finances (e.g. putting in extra hours, or investing savings) in order to arrive at a future-facticity of a modest pay rise, further leading to purchase of an affordable car.

Another aspect of facticity is that it entails angst, both in the sense that freedom "produces" angst when limited by facticity, and in the sense that the lack of the possibility of having facticity to "step in" for one to take responsibility for something one has done, also produces angst.

Another aspect of existential freedom is that one can change one's values. Thus, one is responsible for one's values, regardless of society's values, the focus on freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of the responsibility one bears, as a result of one's freedom: the relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency, and a clarification of freedom also clarifies that for which one is responsible.[31][32]

Many noted existentialist writers consider the theme of authentic existence important. Authentic existence involves the idea that one has to "create oneself" and then live in accordance with this self. What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as "one's acts" or as "one's genes" or any other essence requires, the authentic act is one that is in accordance with one's freedom. As a condition of freedom is facticity, this includes one's facticity, but not to the degree that this facticity can in any way determine one's transcendent choices (in the sense that one could then blame one's background [facticity] for making the choice one made [chosen project, from one's transcendence]), the role of facticity in relation to authenticity involves letting one's actual values come into play when one makes a choice (instead of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, "choosing" randomly), so that one also takes responsibility for the act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have different values.[33]

In contrast to this, the inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one's freedom, this can take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, through convincing oneself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where one acts as "one should".

How "one should" act is often determined by an image one has, of how one such as oneself (say, a bank manager, lion tamer, prostitute, etc.) acts. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre relates an example of a "waiter" in bad faith: he merely takes part in the "act" of being a typical waiter, albeit very convincingly.[34] This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm, but this does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is inauthentic: The main point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom and responsibility, and the extent to which one acts in accordance with this freedom.

The Other (when written with a capital "O") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn from it differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts, the experience of the Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences)—only from "over there"—the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same things. This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze).[35]

While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Other's Look in precisely the same way that one experiences the Other as seen by him, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of freedom, this is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. As such, when one experiences oneself in the Look, one doesn't experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's own example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: at first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other, he is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.

Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is quite possible that the creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the Look isn't some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the other sees one (there may also have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that the person was there). It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive him.

"Existential angst", sometimes called existential dread, anxiety, or anguish, is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility, the archetypical example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom.[23]

It can also be seen in relation to the previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart from fear that has an object. While in the case of fear, one can take definitive measures to remove the object of fear, in the case of angst, no such "constructive" measures are possible, the use of the word "nothing" in this context relates both to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions, and to the fact that, in experiencing freedom as angst, one also realizes that one is fully responsible for these consequences. There is nothing in people (genetically, for instance) that acts in their stead—that they can blame if something goes wrong. Therefore, not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences (and, it can be claimed, human lives would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread). However, this doesn't change the fact that freedom remains a condition of every action.

Despair, in existentialism, is generally defined as a loss of hope.[36] More specifically, it is a loss of hope in reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one's self or identity. If a person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and then finds their being-thing compromised, they would normally be found in a state of despair—a hopeless state, for example, a singer who loses the ability to sing may despair if they have nothing else to fall back on—nothing to rely on for their identity. They find themselves unable to be what defined their being.

What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the conventional definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when they aren't overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can crumble, they are in perpetual despair—and as there is, in Sartrean terms, no human essence found in conventional reality on which to constitute the individual's sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition, as Kierkegaard defines it in Either/Or: "Let each one learn what he can; both of us can learn that a person’s unhappiness never lies in his lack of control over external conditions, since this would only make him completely unhappy."[37] In Works of Love, he said:

When the God-forsaken worldliness of earthly life shuts itself in complacency, the confined air develops poison, the moment gets stuck and stands still, the prospect is lost, a need is felt for a refreshing, enlivening breeze to cleanse the air and dispel the poisonous vapors lest we suffocate in worldliness. ... Lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairingly to hope nothing at all. Love hopes all things—yet is never put to shame. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision. pp. 246–50

Existentialists oppose definitions of human beings as primarily rational, and, therefore, oppose positivism and rationalism. Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on subjective meaning rather than pure rationality, the rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard advocated rationality as a means to interact with the objective world (e.g., in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems, reason is insufficient: "Human reason has boundaries".[38]

Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena—"the Other"—that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress their feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserts, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the Look" of "the Other" (i.e., possessed by another person—or at least one's idea of that other person).

An existentialist reading of the Bible would demand that the reader recognize that (s)he is an existing subject studying the words more as a recollection of events, this is in contrast to looking at a collection of "truths" that are outside and unrelated to the reader, but may develop a sense of reality/God. Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing them upon her/him, but as though they are inside her/him and guiding her/him from inside, this is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life - or the learner who should put it to use?"[39]

Although nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another. A primary cause of confusion is that Friedrich Nietzsche is an important philosopher in both fields, but also the existentialist insistence on the inherent meaninglessness of the world. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of Angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that is often reduced to a moral or an existential nihilism. A pervasive theme in the works of existentialist philosophy, however, is to persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus ("One must imagine Sisyphus happy"),[40] and it is only very rarely that existentialist philosophers dismiss morality or one's self-created meaning: Kierkegaard regained a sort of morality in the religious (although he wouldn't himself agree that it was ethical; the religious suspends the ethical), and Sartre's final words in Being and Nothingness are "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory (or impure) reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work."[34]

The term "existentialism" was coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s.[41][42][43] At first, when Marcel applied the term to him at a colloquium in 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre rejected it.[44] Sartre subsequently changed his mind and, on October 29, 1945, publicly adopted the existentialist label in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris, the lecture was published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), a short book that did much to popularize existentialist thought.[45] Marcel later came to reject the label himself in favour of the term Neo-Socratic, in honor of Kierkegaard's essay "On The Concept of Irony".

Some scholars argue that the term should be used only to refer to the cultural movement in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s associated with the works of the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus.[2] Other scholars extend the term to Kierkegaard, and yet others extend it as far back as Socrates.[46] However, the term is often identified with the philosophical views of Jean-Paul Sartre.[2]

Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity of the chooser.[47] Kierkegaard's knight of faith and Nietzsche's Übermensch are representative of people who exhibit Freedom, in that they define the nature of their own existence. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his own values and creates the very terms they excel under. By contrast, Kierkegaard, opposed to the level of abstraction in Hegel, and not nearly as hostile (actually welcoming) to Christianity as Nietzsche, argues through a pseudonym that the objective certainty of religious truths (specifically Christian) is not only impossible, but even founded on logical paradoxes. Yet he continues to imply that a leap of faith is a possible means for an individual to reach a higher stage of existence that transcends and contains both an aesthetic and ethical value of life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernism, and various strands of psychotherapy. However, Kierkegaard believed that individuals should live in accordance with their thinking.

The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[48] Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground portrays a man unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism, quoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. Sartre attributes Ivan Karamazov's claim, "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"[49] to Dostoyevsky himself, though this quote does not appear in the novel.[50] However, a similar sentiment is explicitly stated when Alyosha visits Dimitri in prison. Dimitri mentions his conversations with Rakitin in which the idea that "Then, if He doesn't exist, man is king of the earth, of the universe" allowing the inference contained in Sartre's attribution to remain a valid idea contested within the novel.[51] Other Dostoyevsky novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoyevsky himself.[52]

In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers explored existentialist ideas, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, in his 1913 book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, emphasized the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism. Unamuno rejected systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith, he retained a sense of the tragic, even absurd nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest in Cervantes' fictional character Don Quixote. A novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy professor at the University of Salamanca, Unamuno wrote a short story about a priest's crisis of faith, Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr, which has been collected in anthologies of existentialist fiction. Another Spanish thinker, Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1914, held that human existence must always be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life: "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" ("I am myself and my circumstances"). Sartre likewise believed that human existence is not an abstract matter, but is always situated ("en situation").

Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught at the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt, he stands apart from the mainstream of German philosophy. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1878, he was also a scholar of Jewish culture and involved at various times in Zionism and Hasidism; in 1938, he moved permanently to Jerusalem. His best-known philosophical work was the short book I and Thou, published in 1922, for Buber, the fundamental fact of human existence, too readily overlooked by scientific rationalism and abstract philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue that takes place in the so-called "sphere of between" ("das Zwischenmenschliche").[53]

Two Russian thinkers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev, became well known as existentialist thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris. Shestov, born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family in Kiev, had launched an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early as 1905 in his book of aphorisms All Things Are Possible.

Berdyaev, also from Kiev but with a background in the Eastern Orthodox Church, drew a radical distinction between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for Berdyaev, is rooted in the realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation. To the extent the individual human being lives in the objective world, he is estranged from authentic spiritual freedom. "Man" is not to be interpreted naturalistically, but as a being created in God's image, an originator of free, creative acts.[54] He published a major work on these themes, The Destiny of Man, in 1931.

Gabriel Marcel, long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important existentialist themes to a French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" (1925) and in his Metaphysical Journal (1927).[55] A dramatist as well as a philosopher, Marcel found his philosophical starting point in a condition of metaphysical alienation: the human individual searching for harmony in a transient life. Harmony, for Marcel, was to be sought through "secondary reflection", a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world, characterized by "wonder and astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of God rather than merely to "information" about them, for Marcel, such presence implied more than simply being there (as one thing might be in the presence of another thing); it connoted "extravagant" availability, and the willingness to put oneself at the disposal of the other.[56]

Marcel contrasted secondary reflection with abstract, scientific-technical primary reflection, which he associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a concrete activity undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate—embodied—in a concrete world,[55][57] although Jean-Paul Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own philosophy in the 1940s, Marcel's thought has been described as "almost diametrically opposed" to that of Sartre.[55] Unlike Sartre, Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in 1929.

In Germany, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers—who later described existentialism as a "phantom" created by the public[58]—called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Existenzphilosophie, for Jaspers, "Existenz-philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself...This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker".[59]

Jaspers, a professor at the University of Heidelberg, was acquainted with Martin Heidegger, who held a professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928. They held many philosophical discussions, but later became estranged over Heidegger's support of National Socialism (Nazism), they shared an admiration for Kierkegaard,[60] and in the 1930s, Heidegger lectured extensively on Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the extent to which Heidegger should be considered an existentialist is debatable; in Being and Time he presented a method of rooting philosophical explanations in human existence (Dasein) to be analysed in terms of existential categories (existentiale); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the existentialist movement.

Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as well as theoretical texts.[61] These years also saw the growing reputation of Heidegger's book Being and Time outside Germany.

Sartre dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel Nausea and the short stories in his 1939 collection The Wall, and had published his treatise on existentialism, Being and Nothingness, in 1943, but it was in the two years following the liberation of Paris from the German occupying forces that he and his close associates—Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others—became internationally famous as the leading figures of a movement known as existentialism.[62] In a very short period of time, Camus and Sartre in particular became the leading public intellectuals of post-war France, achieving by the end of 1945 "a fame that reached across all audiences."[63] Camus was an editor of the most popular leftist (former French Resistance) newspaper Combat; Sartre launched his journal of leftist thought, Les Temps Modernes, and two weeks later gave the widely reported lecture on existentialism and secular humanism to a packed meeting of the Club Maintenant. Beauvoir wrote that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us";[64] existentialism became "the first media craze of the postwar era."[65]

By the end of 1947, Camus' earlier fiction and plays had been reprinted, his new play Caligula had been performed and his novel The Plague published; the first two novels of Sartre's The Roads to Freedom trilogy had appeared, as had Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others. Works by Camus and Sartre were already appearing in foreign editions, the Paris-based existentialists had become famous.[62]

Heidegger read Sartre's work and was initially impressed, commenting: "Here for the first time I encountered an independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out of which I think. Your work shows such an immediate comprehension of my philosophy as I have never before encountered."[69] Later, however, in response to a question posed by his French follower Jean Beaufret,[70] Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre's position and existentialism in general in his Letter on Humanism.[71] Heidegger's reputation continued to grow in France during the 1950s and 1960s; in the 1960s, Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason. A major theme throughout his writings was freedom and responsibility.

Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with existential themes including The Rebel, Summer in Algiers, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Stranger, the latter being "considered—to what would have been Camus's irritation—the exemplary existentialist novel."[72] Camus, like many others, rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works concerned with facing the absurd; in the titular book, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth of Sisyphus to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it, the first half of the book contains an extended rebuttal of what Camus took to be existentialist philosophy in the works of Kierkegaard, Shestov, Heidegger, and Jaspers.

Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner, wrote about feminist and existentialist ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity. Although often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre,[73] de Beauvoir integrated existentialism with other forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time, resulting in alienation from fellow writers such as Camus.[52]

Paul Tillich, an important existentialist theologian following Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, applied existentialist concepts to Christian theology, and helped introduce existential theology to the general public. His seminal work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and life's absurdity, but puts forward the thesis that modern humans must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite of life's absurdity. Rudolf Bultmann used Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's philosophy of existence to demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian mythical concepts into existentialist concepts.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an existential phenomenologist, was for a time a companion of Sartre. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) was recognized as a major statement of French existentialism,[74] it has been said that Merleau-Ponty's work Humanism and Terror greatly influenced Sartre. However, in later years they were to disagree irreparably, dividing many existentialists such as de Beauvoir,[52] who sided with Sartre.

Colin Wilson, an English writer, published his study The Outsider in 1956, initially to critical acclaim. In this book and others (e.g. Introduction to the New Existentialism), he attempted to reinvigorate what he perceived as a pessimistic philosophy and bring it to a wider audience. He was not, however, academically trained, and his work was attacked by professional philosophers for lack of rigor and critical standards.[75]

Stanley Kubrick's 1957 anti-war filmPaths of Glory "illustrates, and even illuminates...existentialism" by examining the "necessary absurdity of the human condition" and the "horror of war".[76] The film tells the story of a fictional World War I French army regiment ordered to attack an impregnable German stronghold; when the attack fails, three soldiers are chosen at random, court-martialed by a "kangaroo court", and executed by firing squad. The film examines existentialist ethics, such as the issue of whether objectivity is possible and the "problem of authenticity".[76]Orson Welles' 1962 film The Trial, based upon Franz Kafka's book of the same name (Der Process), is characteristic of both existentialist and absurdist themes in its depiction of a man (Joseph K.) arrested for a crime for which the charges are neither revealed to him nor to the reader.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote No Exit in 1944, an existentialist play originally published in French as Huis Clos (meaning In Camera or "behind closed doors"), which is the source of the popular quote, "Hell is other people." (In French, "L'enfer, c'est les autres"). The play begins with a Valet leading a man into a room that the audience soon realizes is in hell. Eventually he is joined by two women, after their entry, the Valet leaves and the door is shut and locked. All three expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories.

Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd, notably in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two men divert themselves while they wait expectantly for someone (or something) named Godot who never arrives. They claim Godot is an acquaintance, but in fact, hardly know him, admitting they would not recognize him if they saw him. Samuel Beckett, once asked who or what Godot is, replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." To occupy themselves, the men eat, sleep, talk, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide—anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay".[93] The play "exploits several archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[94] The play also illustrates an attitude toward human experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can be reconciled only in the mind and art of the absurdist, the play examines questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence.

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdisttragicomedy first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.[95] The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare'sHamlet. Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, for the presence of two central characters who appear almost as two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing Questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time, the two characters are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world beyond their understanding. They stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications, and muse on the irrationality and randomness of the world.

Jean Anouilh's Antigone also presents arguments founded on existentialist ideas.[96] It is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name (Antigone, by Sophocles) from the 5th century BC; in English, it is often distinguished from its antecedent by being pronounced in its original French form, approximately "Ante-GŌN." The play was first performed in Paris on 6 February 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France. Produced under Nazi censorship, the play is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority (represented by Antigone) and the acceptance of it (represented by Creon), the parallels to the French Resistance and the Nazi occupation have been drawn. Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but without affirmatively choosing a noble death, the crux of the play is the lengthy dialogue concerning the nature of power, fate, and choice, during which Antigone says that she is, "... disgusted with [the]...promise of a humdrum happiness." She states that she would rather die than live a mediocre existence.

Critic Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov wove into their plays the existentialist belief that we are absurd beings loose in a universe empty of real meaning. Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than did the plays by Sartre and Camus. Though most of such playwrights, subsequently labeled "Absurdist" (based on Esslin's book), denied affiliations with existentialism and were often staunchly anti-philosophical (for example Ionesco often claimed he identified more with 'Pataphysics or with Surrealism than with existentialism), the playwrights are often linked to existentialism based on Esslin's observation.[97]

An early contributor to existentialist psychology in the United States was Rollo May, who was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard and Otto Rank. One of the most prolific writers on techniques and theory of existentialist psychology in the USA is Irvin D. Yalom. Yalom states that

Aside from their reaction against Freud's mechanistic, deterministic model of the mind and their assumption of a phenomenological approach in therapy, the existentialist analysts have little in common and have never been regarded as a cohesive ideological school, these thinkers—who include Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Eugène Minkowski, V.E. Gebsattel, Roland Kuhn, G. Caruso, F.T. Buytendijk, G. Bally and Victor Frankl—were almost entirely unknown to the American psychotherapeutic community until Rollo May's highly influential 1985 book Existence—and especially his introductory essay—introduced their work into this country.[101]

A more recent contributor to the development of a European version of existentialist psychotherapy is the British-based Emmy van Deurzen.

Anxiety's importance in existentialism makes it a popular topic in psychotherapy. Therapists often offer existentialist philosophy as an explanation for anxiety, the assertion is that anxiety is manifested of an individual's complete freedom to decide, and complete responsibility for the outcome of such decisions. Psychotherapists using an existentialist approach believe that a patient can harness his anxiety and use it constructively. Instead of suppressing anxiety, patients are advised to use it as grounds for change. By embracing anxiety as inevitable, a person can use it to achieve his full potential in life. Humanistic psychology also had major impetus from existentialist psychology and shares many of the fundamental tenets. Terror management theory, based on the writings of Ernest Becker and Otto Rank, is a developing area of study within the academic study of psychology. It looks at what researchers claim are implicit emotional reactions of people confronted with the knowledge that they will eventually die.

Walter Kaufmann criticized 'the profoundly unsound methods and the dangerous contempt for reason that have been so prominent in existentialism.'[102]Logical positivist philosophers, such as Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer, assert that existentialists are often confused about the verb "to be" in their analyses of "being".[103] Specifically, they argue that the verb "is" is transitive and pre-fixed to a predicate (e.g., an apple is red) (without a predicate, the word "is" is meaningless), and that existentialists frequently misuse the term in this manner. Colin Wilson has stated in his book The Angry Years that existentialism has created many of its own difficulties: "we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole".[104]

Many critics argue Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy is contradictory. Specifically, they argue that Sartre makes metaphysical arguments despite his claiming that his philosophical views ignore metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse criticized Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself: "Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory".[105]

Existentialism says existence precedes essence; in this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement, but the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.[106]

^However he did title his 1846 book Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, (Subtitle) A Mimical-Pathetic-Dialectical Compilation an Existential Contribution, and mentioned the term on pages 121–22, 191, 350–51, 387 ff of that book.

^Entry on Kojève in Martin Cohen (editor), The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics(Hodder Arnold, 2006, p. 158); see also Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (Cornell University Press, 1980)

^Yalom, Irvin D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. New York: BasicBooks (Subsidiary of Perseus Books, L.L.C. p. 17. ISBN0-465-02147-6. Note: The copyright year has not changed, but the book remains in print.

1.
Essentialism
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Essentialism is the view that for any specific entity there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function. In Western thought the concept is found in the work of Plato, Platonic idealism is the earliest known theory of how all things and concepts have an essential reality behind them, an essence that makes those things and concepts what they are. Aristotles Categories proposes that all objects are the objects they are by virtue of their substance and this view is contrasted with non-essentialism, which states that, for any given kind of entity, there are no specific traits which entities of that kind must possess. Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning, in gender studies, essentialism continues to be a matter of contention. French structuralist feminism was often accused of subscribing to an essentialism, an essence characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the Forms or Ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal, and present in every possible world, Classical humanism has an essentialist conception of the human being, which means that it believes in an eternal and unchangeable human nature. The idea of a human nature has been criticized by Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre. In Platos philosophy, things were said to come into being in this world by the action of a demiurge who works to form chaos into ordered entities, many definitions of essence hark back to the ancient Greek hylomorphic understanding of the formation of the things of this world. According to that account, the structure and real existence of any thing can be understood by analogy to an artifact produced by a craftsman. The craftsman requires hyle and a model, plan or idea in his own mind according to which the wood is worked to give it the indicated contour or form, Aristotle was the first to use the terms hyle and morphe. According to his explanation, all entities have two aspects, matter and form and it is the particular form imposed that gives some matter its identity, its quiddity or whatness. Plato was one of the first essentialists, believing in the concept of ideal forms, Platos forms are regarded as patriarchs to essentialist dogma simply because they are a case of what is intrinsic and a-contextual of objects — the abstract properties that makes them what they are. For more on forms, read Platos parable of the cave, karl Popper splits the ambiguous term realism into essentialism and realism. He uses essentialism whenever he means the opposite of nominalism, Popper himself is a realist as opposed to an idealist, but a methodological nominalist as opposed to an essentialist. For example, statements like a puppy is a dog should be read from right to left, as an answer to What shall we call a young dog. Essentialism, in its broadest sense, is any philosophy that acknowledges the primacy of Essence, unlike Existentialism, which posits being as the fundamental reality, the essentialist ontology must be approached from a metaphysical perspective. Empirical knowledge is developed from experience of a universe whose components. Thus, for the scientist, reality is explored as a system of diverse entities

2.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel and his most acclaimed works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevskys oeuvre consists of 11 novels, three novellas,17 short stories and numerous other works, many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature. His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature, born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoyevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends, and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died in 1837 when he was 15, and around the time he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, in the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into St. Petersburgs literary circles. Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a group that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia, he was sentenced to death. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of military service in exile. In the following years, Dostoyevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writers Diary and he began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he became one of the most widely read. His books have been translated more than 170 languages. Dostoyevskys parents were part of a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational Lithuanian noble family from the Pinsk region, branches of the family included Russian Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics and Eastern Catholics. Dostoyevskys immediate ancestors on his mothers side were merchants, the line on his fathers side were priests. His father, Mikhail, was expected to join the clergy but instead ran away from home, in 1809, the 20-year-old Mikhail Dostoyevsky enrolled in Moscows Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. From there he was assigned to a Moscow hospital, where he served as military doctor, in 1819 he married Maria Nechayeva. The following year, he took up a post at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor, Dostoyevskys parents subsequently had six more children, Varvara, Andrei, Lyubov, Vera, Nikolai and Aleksandra. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, born on 11 November 1821, was the child of Dr. Mikhail Dostoyevsky. He was raised in the home in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor

3.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology and his work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre was also noted for his relationship with prominent feminist. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, Sartres introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism and Humanism, originally presented as a lecture. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it, saying that he always declined official honours, Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, when Sartre was two years old, his father died of a fever overseas. When he was twelve, Sartres mother remarried, and the moved to La Rochelle. As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergsons essay Time and Free Will and he attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris. It was at ENS that Sartre began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartres philosophical development was his weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojèves seminars, which continued for a number of years. From his first years in the École Normale, Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters, in 1927, his antimilitarist satirical cartoon in the revue of the school, coauthored with Georges Canguilhem, particularly upset the director Gustave Lanson. Many newspapers, including Le Petit Parisien, announced the event on 25 May, thousands, including journalists and curious spectators, showed up, unaware that what they were witnessing was a stunt involving a Lindbergh look-alike. The publics resultant outcry forced Lanson to resign, in 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though they were not monogamous, the first time Sartre took the exam to become a college instructor, he failed. He took it a time and virtually tied for first place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually awarded first place in his class. Sartre was drafted into the French Army from 1929 to 1931 and he later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence. From 1931 until 1945, Sartre taught at various lycées of Le Havre, Laon, in 1932, Sartre discovered Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a book that had a remarkable influence on him. In 1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at the Institut français dAllemagne in Berlin where he studied Edmund Husserls phenomenological philosophy, Aron had already advised him in 1930 to read Emmanuel Levinass Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. The Neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a generation of French thinkers, including Sartre

4.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and he lived his remaining years in the care of his mother, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and died in 1900. Nietzsches body of work touched widely on art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Schopenhauer, Wagner. His writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism, born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned forty-nine on the day of Nietzsches birth, Nietzsches parents, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler, married in 1843, the year before their sons birth. They had two children, a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph. Nietzsches father died from an ailment in 1849, Ludwig Joseph died six months later. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsches maternal grandmother, after the death of Nietzsches grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house, now Nietzsche-Haus, a museum and Nietzsche study centre. Nietzsche attended a school and then, later, a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug, Rudolf Wagner. In 1854, he began to attend Domgymnasium in Naumburg, because his father had worked for the state the now-fatherless Nietzsche was offered a scholarship to study at the internationally recognized Schulpforta. He transferred and studied there from 1858 to 1864, becoming friends with Paul Deussen and he also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. Nietzsche led Germania, a music and literature club, during his summers in Naumburg. His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a 1 in Religion and German, a 2a in Greek and Latin, a 2b in French, History, and Physics, while at Pforta, Nietzsche had a penchant for pursuing subjects that were considered unbecoming. The teacher who corrected the essay gave it a mark but commented that Nietzsche should concern himself in the future with healthier, more lucid. After graduation in September 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology, for a short time he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester, he stopped his studies and lost his faith. In June 1865, at the age of 20, Nietzsche wrote to his sister Elisabeth, who was deeply religious, a letter regarding his loss of faith

5.
Europe
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Europe is a continent that comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, yet the non-oceanic borders of Europe—a concept dating back to classical antiquity—are arbitrary. Europe covers about 10,180,000 square kilometres, or 2% of the Earths surface, politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states of which the Russian Federation is the largest and most populous, spanning 39% of the continent and comprising 15% of its population. Europe had a population of about 740 million as of 2015. Further from the sea, seasonal differences are more noticeable than close to the coast, Europe, in particular ancient Greece, was the birthplace of Western civilization. The fall of the Western Roman Empire, during the period, marked the end of ancient history. Renaissance humanism, exploration, art, and science led to the modern era, from the Age of Discovery onwards, Europe played a predominant role in global affairs. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers controlled at times the Americas, most of Africa, Oceania. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, gave rise to economic, cultural, and social change in Western Europe. During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the east, until the revolutions of 1989 and fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1955, the Council of Europe was formed following a speech by Sir Winston Churchill and it includes all states except for Belarus, Kazakhstan and Vatican City. Further European integration by some states led to the formation of the European Union, the EU originated in Western Europe but has been expanding eastward since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The European Anthem is Ode to Joy and states celebrate peace, in classical Greek mythology, Europa is the name of either a Phoenician princess or of a queen of Crete. The name contains the elements εὐρύς, wide, broad and ὤψ eye, broad has been an epithet of Earth herself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion and the poetry devoted to it. For the second part also the divine attributes of grey-eyed Athena or ox-eyed Hera. The same naming motive according to cartographic convention appears in Greek Ανατολή, Martin Litchfield West stated that phonologically, the match between Europas name and any form of the Semitic word is very poor. Next to these there is also a Proto-Indo-European root *h1regʷos, meaning darkness. Most major world languages use words derived from Eurṓpē or Europa to refer to the continent, in some Turkic languages the originally Persian name Frangistan is used casually in referring to much of Europe, besides official names such as Avrupa or Evropa

6.
Authenticity (philosophy)
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Authenticity is a technical term used in psychology as well as existentialist philosophy and aesthetics. A lack of authenticity is considered in existentialism to be bad faith, views of authenticity in cultural activities vary widely. For instance, the philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno had opposing views regarding jazz, with Sartre considering it authentic and Adorno inauthentic. The concept of authenticity is often aired in musical subcultures, such as rock and heavy metal. There is also a focus on authenticity in music such as. house, grunge, garage, hip-hop, techno. One of the greatest problems facing such abstract approaches is that the people call the needs of ones inner being are diffuse, subjective. For this reason among others, authenticity is often at the limits of language, it is described as the space around inauthenticity. Sartre is concerned also with the experience of absolute freedom. In Sartres view, this experience, necessary for the state of authenticity, typically, authenticity is seen as a very general concept, not attached to any particular political or aesthetic ideology. This is an aspect of authenticity, because it concerns a persons relation with the world. In this manner, authenticity is connected with creativity, the impetus to action must arise from the person in question, Heidegger takes this notion to the extreme, by speaking in very abstract terms about modes of living. Kierkegaards work often focuses on stories which are not directly imitable. Sartre, as has been noted above, focused on inauthentic existence as a way to avoid the problem of appearing to provide prescriptions for a mode of living that rejects external dictation. Authenticity, according to Kierkegaard, is reliant on an individual finding authentic faith, Kierkegaard develops the idea that news media and the bourgeois church-Christianity present challenges for an individual in society trying to live authentically. Kierkegaard thus sees “both the media and the church as intervening agencies, blocking people’s way to true experiences, authenticity, and God. “ His conviction lies with the idea that mass-culture creates a loss of individual significance, similarly, he interprets religion as a tradition that is passively accepted by individuals, without the inclusion of authentic thought. Kierkegaard believes that authentic faith can be achieved by “facing reality, making a choice and then sticking with it. ”The goal of Kierkegaard’s existentialist philosophy is to show that, in order to achieve authenticity, one must face reality. So as not to be discouraged by levelling, Kierkegaard suggests, “One must make a choice to surrender to something that goes beyond comprehension

7.
Existential dread
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While the predominant value of existentialist thought is commonly acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is authenticity. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience. Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher and he proposed that each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely, or authentically. Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II, and strongly influenced many disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology. The term is seen as a historical convenience as it was first applied to many philosophers in hindsight. In fact, while existentialism is generally considered to have originated with Kierkegaard, Sartre posits the idea that what all existentialists have in common is the fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence, as scholar Frederick Copleston explains. Sartre himself, in a lecture delivered in 1945, described existentialism as the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism and this assertion comes from two sources. The Norwegian philosopher Erik Lundestad refers to the Danish philosopher Fredrik Christian Sibbern, Sibbern is supposed to have had two conversations in 1841, the first with Welhaven and the second with Kierkegaard. This was then brought to Kierkegaard by Sibbern, the second claim comes from the Norwegian historian Rune Slagstad, who claims to prove that Kierkegaard himself said the term existential was borrowed from the poet. He strongly believes that it was Kierkegaard himself who said that Hegelians do not study philosophy existentially, on the other hand, the Norwegian historian Anne-Lise Seip is critical of Slagstad, and believes the statement in fact stems from the Norwegian literary historian Cathrinus Bang. The actual life of the individuals is what constitutes what could be called their true essence instead of there being an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them, thus, human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life. However, an existentialist philosopher would say such a wish constitutes an inauthentic existence - what Sartre would call bad faith, instead, the phrase should be taken to say that people are defined only insofar as they act and that they are responsible for their actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, furthermore, by this action of cruelty, such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity. This is as opposed to their genes, or human nature, as Sartre writes in his work Existentialism is a Humanism. Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. Of course, the positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied, A person can choose to act in a different way. Here it is clear that since humans can choose to be either cruel or good, they are, in fact. Sartres definition of existentialism was based on Heideggers magnum opus Being and this way of living, Heidegger called average everydayness

8.
Absurdism
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In philosophy, the Absurd refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean logically impossible, but rather humanly impossible, the universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously. As a philosophy, absurdism furthermore explores the nature of the Absurd and how individuals, once becoming conscious of the Absurd. The absurdist philosopher Albert Camus stated that individuals should embrace the absurd condition of existence while also defiantly continuing to explore. Absurdism shares some concepts, and a common template, with existentialism and nihilism. The aftermath of World War II provided the environment that stimulated absurdist views and allowed for their popular development. In absurdist philosophy, the Absurd arises out of the fundamental disharmony between the search for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. As beings looking for meaning in a world, humans have three ways of resolving the dilemma. Kierkegaard and Camus describe the solutions in their works, The Sickness Unto Death and The Myth of Sisyphus, respectively, Suicide, both Kierkegaard and Camus dismiss the viability of this option. Camus states that it does not counter the Absurd, rather, the act of ending ones existence only becomes more absurd. Religious, spiritual, or abstract belief in a transcendent realm, being, or idea, a solution in which one believes in the existence of a reality that is beyond the Absurd, and, as such, has meaning. Kierkegaard stated that a belief in anything beyond the Absurd requires an irrational but perhaps necessary religious acceptance in such an intangible, however, Camus regarded this solution, and others, as philosophical suicide. Acceptance of the Absurd, a solution in which one accepts the Absurd, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, regarded this solution as demoniac madness, He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery from him. The three schools of thought diverge from there, existentialists have generally advocated the individuals construction of his or her own meaning in life as well as the free will of the individual. Nihilists, on the contrary, contend that it is futile to seek or to affirm meaning where none can be found. Absurdists following Camus also devalue or outright reject free will, encouraging merely that the individual live defiantly and authentically in spite of the tension of the Absurd. Camuss own understanding of the world, and every vision he had for its progress, however, a century before Camus, the 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote extensively about the absurdity of the world. In his journals, Kierkegaard writes about the absurd, Here is another example of the Absurd from his writings, Kierkegaard says, Kierkegaard provides an example in one of his works, Fear and Trembling

9.
World War II
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World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific. The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan

10.
Philosophy
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Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument and systematic presentation, classic philosophical questions include, Is it possible to know anything and to prove it. However, philosophers might also pose more practical and concrete questions such as, is it better to be just or unjust. Historically, philosophy encompassed any body of knowledge, from the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, natural philosophy encompassed astronomy, medicine and physics. For example, Newtons 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics, in the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize. In the modern era, some investigations that were part of philosophy became separate academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology. Other investigations closely related to art, science, politics, or other pursuits remained part of philosophy, for example, is beauty objective or subjective. Are there many scientific methods or just one, is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy. Major sub-fields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, since the 20th century, professional philosophers contribute to society primarily as professors, researchers and writers. Traditionally, the term referred to any body of knowledge. In this sense, philosophy is related to religion, mathematics, natural science, education. This division is not obsolete but has changed, Natural philosophy has split into the various natural sciences, especially astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology. Moral philosophy has birthed the social sciences, but still includes value theory, metaphysical philosophy has birthed formal sciences such as logic, mathematics and philosophy of science, but still includes epistemology, cosmology and others. Many philosophical debates that began in ancient times are still debated today, colin McGinn and others claim that no philosophical progress has occurred during that interval. Chalmers and others, by contrast, see progress in philosophy similar to that in science, in one general sense, philosophy is associated with wisdom, intellectual culture and a search for knowledge. In that sense, all cultures and literate societies ask philosophical questions such as how are we to live, a broad and impartial conception of philosophy then, finds a reasoned inquiry into such matters as reality, morality and life in all world civilizations. Socrates was an influential philosopher, who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was a pursuer of wisdom

11.
Frederick Copleston
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Frederick Charles Copleston, SJ, CBE was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy. Frederick Charles Copleston was born 10 April 1907 near Taunton, Somerset and he was raised in the Anglican faith—his uncle, Reginald Stephen Copleston, was an Anglican bishop of Calcutta—and was educated at Marlborough College from 1920 to 1925. At the age of eighteen, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith, despite his initial objections, his father helped him complete his education at St Johns College, Oxford, where he studied from 1925 to 1929. He graduated from Oxford University in 1929 having managed a third in classical moderations, in 1930, Copleston became a Jesuit. After studying at the Jesuit novitiate in Roehampton for two years, he resettled at Heythrop, where in 1937 he was ordained a Jesuit priest at Heythrop College. In 1938 he traveled to Germany to complete his training, returning to Britain just before the outbreak of war in 1939, Copleston originally intended to study for his doctorate at the Gregorian University in Rome, but the war now made that impossible. Instead, he accepted an offer to return to Heythrop College to teach the history of philosophy to the few remaining Jesuits there. While teaching at Heythrop College, Copleston began writing his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy, a textbook that presents clear accounts of ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy. Still highly respected, Coplestons history has described as a monumental achievement that stays true to the authors it discusses. In 1970, he was made Fellow of the British Academy, in 1975, he was made an Honorary Fellow of St. Johns College, Oxford. After officially retiring in 1974, he continued to lecture and these lectures were attempted to express themes perennial in his thinking and more personal than in his history. Toward the end of his life, Copleston received honorary doctorates from institutions, including Santa Clara University, California, Uppsala University. Copleston was offered memberships in the Royal Institute of Philosophy and in the Aristotelian Society, Copleston died on 3 February 1994 at St Thomas Hospital in London, at the age of 86. In addition to his influential multi-volume History of Philosophy, one of Coplestons most significant contributions to philosophy was his work on the theories of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He attempted to clarify Aquinass Five Ways by making a distinction between in fieri causes and in esse causes, Copleston vs Bertrand Russell on YouTube Frederick Copleston on Schopenhauer on YouTube

12.
Atheism
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Atheism is, in the broadest sense, the absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is the rejection of belief that any deities exist, in an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which, in its most general form, is the belief that at least one deity exists, the etymological root for the word atheism originated before the 5th century BCE from the ancient Greek ἄθεος, meaning without god. The term denoted a social category created by orthodox religionists into which those who did not share their religious beliefs were placed, the actual term atheism emerged first in the 16th century. With the spread of freethought, skeptical inquiry, and subsequent increase in criticism of religion, application of the term narrowed in scope, the first individuals to identify themselves using the word atheist lived in the 18th century during the Age of Enlightenment. The French Revolution, noted for its unprecedented atheism, witnessed the first major movement in history to advocate for the supremacy of human reason. Arguments for atheism range from the philosophical to social and historical approaches, although some atheists have adopted secular philosophies, there is no one ideology or set of behaviors to which all atheists adhere. Since conceptions of atheism vary, accurate estimations of current numbers of atheists are difficult, an older survey by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 2004 recorded atheists as comprising 8% of the worlds population. Other older estimates have indicated that atheists comprise 2% of the worlds population, according to these polls, Europe and East Asia are the regions with the highest rates of atheism. In 2015, 61% of people in China reported that they were atheists, the figures for a 2010 Eurobarometer survey in the European Union reported that 20% of the EU population claimed not to believe in any sort of spirit, God or life force. Atheism has been regarded as compatible with agnosticism, and has also been contrasted with it, a variety of categories have been used to distinguish the different forms of atheism. Some of the ambiguity and controversy involved in defining atheism arises from difficulty in reaching a consensus for the definitions of words like deity, the plurality of wildly different conceptions of God and deities leads to differing ideas regarding atheisms applicability. The ancient Romans accused Christians of being atheists for not worshiping the pagan deities, gradually, this view fell into disfavor as theism came to be understood as encompassing belief in any divinity. Definitions of atheism also vary in the degree of consideration a person must put to the idea of gods to be considered an atheist, Atheism has sometimes been defined to include the simple absence of belief that any deities exist. This broad definition would include newborns and other people who have not been exposed to theistic ideas, as far back as 1772, Baron dHolbach said that All children are born Atheists, they have no idea of God. Similarly, George H. Smith suggested that, The man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist, ernest Nagel contradicts Smiths definition of atheism as merely absence of theism, acknowledging only explicit atheism as true atheism

13.
Scandinavia
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Scandinavia /ˌskændᵻˈneɪviə/ is a historical and cultural region in Northern Europe characterized by a common ethnocultural North Germanic heritage and mutually intelligible North Germanic languages. The term Scandinavia always includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the remote Norwegian islands of Svalbard and Jan Mayen are usually not seen as a part of Scandinavia, nor is Greenland, an overseas territory of Denmark. This looser definition almost equates to that of the Nordic countries, in Nordic languages, only Denmark, Norway and Sweden are commonly included in the definition of Scandinavia. In English usage, Scandinavia sometimes refers to the geographical area, the name Scandinavia originally referred vaguely to the formerly Danish, now Swedish, region Scania. Icelanders and the Faroese are to a significant extent descended from the Norse, Finland is mainly populated by Finns, with a minority of approximately 5% of Swedish speakers. A small minority of Sami people live in the north of Scandinavia. The Danish, Norwegian and Swedish languages form a continuum and are known as the Scandinavian languages—all of which are considered mutually intelligible with one another. Faroese and Icelandic, sometimes referred to as insular Scandinavian languages, are intelligible in continental Scandinavian languages only to a limited extent, Finnish and Meänkieli are closely related to each other and more distantly to the Sami languages, but are entirely unrelated to the Scandinavian languages. Apart from these, German, Yiddish and Romani are recognized minority languages in Scandinavia, the southern and by far most populous regions of Scandinavia have a temperate climate. Scandinavia extends north of the Arctic Circle, but has mild weather for its latitude due to the Gulf Stream. Much of the Scandinavian mountains have a tundra climate. There are many lakes and moraines, legacies of the last glacial period, Scandinavia usually refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Some sources argue for the inclusion of the Faroe Islands, Finland and Iceland, though that broader region is known by the countries concerned as Norden. Before this time, the term Scandinavia was familiar mainly to classical scholars through Pliny the Elders writings, and was used vaguely for Scania, as a political term, Scandinavia was first used by students agitating for Pan-Scandinavianism in the 1830s. After a visit to Sweden, Andersen became a supporter of early political Scandinavism, the term is often defined according to the conventions of the cultures that lay claim to the term in their own use. More precisely, and subject to no dispute, is that Finland is included in the broader term Nordic countries, various promotional agencies of the Nordic countries in the United States serve to promote market and tourism interests in the region. The official tourist boards of Scandinavia sometimes cooperate under one umbrella, Norways government entered one year later. All five Nordic governments participate in the joint promotional efforts in the United States through the Scandinavian Tourist Board of North America, Scandinavia can thus be considered a subset of the Nordic countries

14.
Johan Sebastian Welhaven
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Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven was a Norwegian author, poet, critic and art theorist. He has been considered one of the greatest figures in Norwegian literature, Johan Welhaven was born in Bergen, Norway in 1807. His grandfather, Johan Andrew Welhaven was a teacher and later assistant to the pastor at St Marys Church, Johan Welhaven was himself the father of Norwegian architect Hjalmar Welhaven. Welhaven attended Bergen Cathedral School from 1817-25, after his final exams at the University of Christiania in 1827, he devoted himself to literature. In 1836 he had visited France and Germany, and in 1858 he went to Italy to study archaeology, in 1840, he was appointed lecturer in philosophy at the Royal Frederiks University in Christiania and delivered a series of lectures on literary subjects. When in 1843 he obtained a job, controversy aroused because he had not even completed his theological degree. Wergeland also searched for the position and completed a degree and used the illustrations of Creation, Man. Afterwards, he spent 26 years lecturing in philosophy at the University from 1840 to 1866 and his influence was extended by his appointment as director of the Society of Arts. He died in Christiania in 1873, Welhaven made his name as a representative of conservatism in Norwegian literature in the 19th century. As shown by an attack on Henrik Wergelands poetry, he opposed the theories of the extreme nationalists and he desired to see Norwegian culture brought into line with that of other European countries, and he himself followed the romantic tradition, being influenced by J. L. Heiberg. He is known for his feud with Henrik Wergeland and for the poem Republikanerne, Welhaven was also romantically involved with Wergelands younger sister Camilla Collett. He gave an exposition of his creed in the 1834 sonnet cycle Norges Dæmring. He published a volume of Digte in 1839, and in 1845 Nyere Digte, other poems followed in 1847 Den Salige,1848,1851 and 1859. He was well known for dealing with nature and folklore, and later for poems about religion, in it, he showed his spiritual side, expressiing empathy for his fellows human being and pious Christian hope with biblical allusions. In the 1840s, Welhaven was a figure of the Norwegian national romanticism movement, Welhaven helped in beginning the career of Hans Gude—a romanticist painter—as it was Welhaven who first recommended that Gude should attend the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. Henrik Wergelands Digtekunst og Polemik ved Aktstykker oplyste, Norges Dæmring, digitized books by Welhaven in the National Library of Norway

15.
Hegelianism
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Hegelianism is the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel which can be summed up by the dictum that the rational alone is real, which means that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories. His goal was to reality to a more synthetic unity within the system of absolute idealism. Hegels method in philosophy consists of the development in each concept. Thus, he hopes, philosophy will not contradict experience, but will give data of experience to the philosophical, which is the ultimately true explanation. Next, we find that the savage has given up this freedom in exchange for its opposite, the restraint, or, as he considers it, the tyranny, of civilization and law. In this triadic process, the stage is the direct opposite. The third stage is the first returned to itself in a higher, truer, richer, the three stages are, therefore, styled, in itself out of itself in and for itself. In logic – which, according to Hegel, is really metaphysic – we have to deal with the process of development applied to reality in its most abstract form. According to Hegel, in logic, we deal in concepts robbed of their content, in logic we are discussing the process in vacuo. Thus, at the beginning of Hegels study of reality. Now, being is not a static concept according to Hegel and it is essentially dynamic, because it tends by its very nature to pass over into nothing, and then to return to itself in the higher concept, becoming. For Aristotle, there was nothing more certain than that being equaled being, or, in words, that being is identical with itself. Hegel does not deny this, but, he adds, it is certain that being tends to become its opposite, nothing. For instance, the truth about this table, for Aristotle, is that it is a table, for Hegel, the equally important truth is that it was a tree, and it will be ashes. The whole truth, for Hegel, is that the tree became a table, thus, becoming, not being, is the highest expression of reality. But one cannot help asking what is it that develops or is developed and its name, Hegel answers, is different in each stage. In the lowest form it is being, higher up it is life, the only thing always present is the process. We may, however, call the process by the name of spirit or idea and we may even call it God, because at least in the third term of every triadic development the process is God

16.
Consciousness
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Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. Despite the difficulty in definition, many believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness, the majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences. The origin of the concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke defined consciousness as the perception of what passes in a mans own mind and his essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnsons celebrated Dictionary. Consciousness is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and dAlemberts Encyclopédie, the earliest English language uses of conscious and consciousness date back, however, to the 1500s. This phrase had the meaning of knowing that one knows. In its earliest uses in the 1500s, the English word conscious retained the meaning of the Latin conscius. For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan wrote, Where two, or more men, know of one and the fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another. The Latin phrase conscius sibi, whose meaning was more related to the current concept of consciousness, was rendered in English as conscious to oneself or conscious unto oneself. For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness, Lockes definition from 1690 illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place. A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience, in the literal sense, conscientia means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by such as Cicero. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else, rené Descartes is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning. Descartes used conscientia the way modern speakers would use conscience, in Search after Truth he says conscience or internal testimony. The dictionary meaning of the word consciousness extends through several centuries, B. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact. The philosophy of mind has given rise to many stances regarding consciousness, something within ones mind is introspectively conscious just in case one introspects it. Introspection is often thought to deliver ones primary knowledge of ones mental life, an experience or other mental entity is phenomenally conscious just in case there is something it is like for one to have it

17.
Martin Heidegger
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Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is acknowledged to be one of the most original. His first and best known book, Being and Time, though unfinished, is one of the philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that has an understanding of Being, and asks the question about it, namely, Human being, for Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. Heideggers later work includes criticisms of technologys instrumentalist understanding in the Western tradition as enframing, treating all of Nature as a reserve on call for human purposes. Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Germany, the son of Johanna, raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church that adhered to the First Vatican Council of 1870, which was observed mainly by the poorer class of Meßkirch. Heidegger was short and sinewy, with piercing eyes. He enjoyed outdoor pursuits, being proficient at skiing. In the two following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent. He served as a soldier during the year of World War I, working behind a desk. During the 1930s, critics of Heideggers espousal of a Nazi-style rhetoric of martial manliness noted the unheroic nature of his service in WWI, in 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp, Heideggers students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Gunther Anders, and Hans Jonas. Following on from Aristotle, he began to develop in his lectures the main theme of his philosophy, the question of the sense of being. He extended the concept of subject to the dimension of history and concrete existence, which he found prefigured in such Christian thinkers as Saint Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Luther and he also read the works of Dilthey, Husserl, and Max Scheler. In 1927, Heidegger published his main work Sein und Zeit, when Husserl retired as Professor of Philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburgs election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg im Breisgau for the rest of his life, declining a number of later offers and his students at Freiburg included Arendt, Günther Anders, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Charles Malik, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Nolte. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928, Heidegger was elected rector of the University on 21 April 1933, and joined the National Socialist German Workers Party on 1 May

18.
Existentialism and Humanism
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Existentialism and Humanism is a 1946 philosophical work by Jean-Paul Sartre, based on a lecture called Existentialism is a Humanism he gave at Club Maintenant in Paris, on 29 October 1945. Existentialism and Humanism was the used in the United Kingdom. Once a popular starting-point in discussions of Existentialist thought, the work has been criticized by several philosophers, Sartre himself later rejected some of the views he expressed in it and regretted its publication. Sartre asserts that the key defining concept of existentialism is that the existence of a person is prior to his or her essence, the term existence precedes essence subsequently became a maxim of the existentialist movement. Put simply, this means there is nothing to dictate that persons character, goals in life, and so on. According to Sartre, man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world –, thus, Sartre rejects what he calls deterministic excuses and claims that people must take responsibility for their behavior. Sartre defines anguish as the emotion that people once they realize that they are responsible not just for themselves. Anguish leads people to realize that their actions guide humanity and allows them to make judgments about others based on their attitude towards freedom, anguish is also associated with Sartres notion of despair, which he defines as optimistic reliance on a set of possibilities that make action possible. Sartre claims that In fashioning myself, I fashion Man, saying that the action will affect. The being-for-itself uses despair to embrace freedom and take action in full acceptance of whatever consequences may arise as a result. Sartre closes his work by emphasizing that existentialism, as it is a philosophy of action and ones defining oneself, is optimistic, several philosophers have criticized Existentialism and Humanism. In Heideggers view, Sartre stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the truth of Being, according to Kaufmann, Sartre makes factual errors, including misidentifying philosopher Karl Jaspers as a Catholic, and presents a definition of existentialism that is open to question. Thomas C. Anderson criticized Sartre for asserting without explanation if a person seeks freedom from false, external authorities. Iris Murdoch found one of Sartres discussions with a Marxist interesting, Sartre himself later rejected some of the views he expressed in Existentialism and Humanism, and regretted its publication. Warnock believes he was right to dismiss the work, 11–30, by Professor Spade at Indiana University. A student’s guide to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism - Philosophy Now

19.
Samuel Beckett
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Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century, Becketts work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and he was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, the family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuels father, William. Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday,13 April 1906, to William Frank Beckett, a quantity surveyor and descendant of the Huguenots, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse, Beckett had one older brother, Frank Edward Beckett. At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool, where he started to learn music, in 1919, Beckett went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman, later, he was to play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first class cricket, Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927. He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926, Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, took up the post of lecteur danglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy and this meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake, in 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay entitled Dante. Becketts close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, Becketts first short story, Assumption, was published in Jolass periodical transition. In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer, in November 1930, he presented a paper in French to the Modern Languages Society of Trinity on the Toulouse poet Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called le Concentrisme. It was a parody, for Beckett had in fact invented the poet and his movement that claimed to be at odds with all that is clear. Beckett later insisted that he had not intended to fool his audience, when Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was at an end. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, two years later, following his fathers death, he began two years treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Becketts later works, such as Watt, in 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it

20.
Franz Kafka
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Franz Kafka was a Prague German-language novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His best known works include Die Verwandlung, Der Process, the term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing. Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague and he trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education he was employed with an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and he became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis and his work went on to influence a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th century. Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his family were middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Hermann Kafka, was the child of Jakob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer in Osek. Hermann brought the Kafka family to Prague, after working as a travelling sales representative, he eventually became a fancy goods and clothing retailer who employed up to 15 people and used the image of a jackdaw as his business logo. Kafkas mother, Julie, was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a retail merchant in Poděbrady. Hermann and Julie had six children, of whom Franz was the eldest, franzs two brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven, his three sisters were Gabriele, Valerie and Ottilie. They all died during the Holocaust of World War II, Valli was deported to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland in 1942, but that is the last documentation of her. On business days, both parents were absent from the home, with Julie Kafka working as many as 12 hours each day helping to manage the family business, consequently, Kafkas childhood was somewhat lonely, and the children were reared largely by a series of governesses and servants. The dominating figure of Kafkas father had a significant influence on Kafkas writing, the Kafka family had a servant girl living with them in a cramped apartment. In November 1913 the family moved into an apartment, although Ellie. In early August 1914, just after World War I began, both Ellie and Valli also had children. Franz at age 31 moved into Vallis former apartment, quiet by contrast, from 1889 to 1893, Kafka attended the Deutsche Knabenschule German boys elementary school at the Masný trh/Fleischmarkt, now known as Masná Street. His Jewish education ended with his Bar Mitzvah celebration at the age of 13, Kafka never enjoyed attending the synagogue and went with his father only on four high holidays a year. German was the language of instruction, but Kafka also spoke and he studied the latter at the gymnasium for eight years, achieving good grades

21.
Miguel de Unamuno
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Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor of Greek and Classics, and later rector at the University of Salamanca. His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life, and his most famous novel was Abel Sánchez, The History of a Passion, Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao, a port city of Basque Country, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo. As a young man, he was interested in the Basque language, the contest was finally won by the Basque scholar Resurrección María de Azkue. Unamuno worked in all genres, the essay, the novel, poetry, and theater. Unamuno would have preferred to be a professor, but was unable to get an academic appointment. Instead he became a Greek professor, in 1901 Unamuno gave his well-known conference on the scientific and literary inviability of the Basque. According to Azurmendi, Unamuno went against the Basque language once his political views changed along his reflection on Spain, in addition to his writing, Unamuno played an important role in the intellectual life of Spain. He served as rector of the University of Salamanca for two periods, from 1900 to 1924 and 1930 to 1936, during a time of social and political upheaval. Unamuno was removed from his two university chairs by the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1924, over the protests of other Spanish intellectuals. He lived in exile until 1930, first banished to Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands, his house there is now a museum, from Fuerteventura he escaped to France, as related in his book De Fuerteventura a Paris. After a year in Paris, Unamuno established himself in Hendaye, Unamuno returned to Spain after the fall of General Primo de Riveras dictatorship in 1930 and took up his rectorship again. It is said in Salamanca that the day he returned to the University, as Fray Luis de León had done in the same place in 1576, after four years of imprisonment by the Inquisition. It was as though he had not been absent at all, after the fall of Primo de Riveras dictatorship, Spain embarked on its Second Republic. He was a candidate for the small intellectual party Agrupación al Servicio de la República and he always was a moderate and refused all political and anticlerical extremisms. Thus he initially welcomed Francos revolt as necessary to rescue Spain from the excesses of the Second Republic, however, the harsh tactics employed by the Francoists in the struggle against their republican opponents caused him to oppose both the Republic and Franco. He called the cry of the elite armed forces group named La Legión—Long live death. —repellent. One historian notes that his address was an act of moral courage. Shortly afterwards, Unamuno was effectively removed for a time from his university post

22.
Luigi Pirandello
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Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre, Pirandellos works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandellos tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd, Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in a village with the curious name of u Càvusu, a poor suburb of Girgenti. Both families, the Pirandellos and the Ricci Gramittos, were ferociously anti-Bourbon and actively participated in the struggle for unification, Pirandello would eventually assimilate this sense of betrayal and resentment and express it in several of his poems and in his novel The Old and the Young. It is also probable that this climate of disillusion inculcated in the young Luigi the sense of disproportion between ideals and reality which is recognizable in his essay on humorism, by the age of twelve he had already written his first tragedy. At the insistence of his father, he was registered at a school but eventually switched to the study of the humanities at the ginnasio. In 1880, the Pirandello family moved to Palermo and it was here, in the capital of Sicily, that Luigi completed his high school education. He also began reading omnivorously, focusing, above all, on 19th-century Italian poets such as Giosuè Carducci and he then started writing his first poems and fell in love with his cousin Lina. During this period the first signs of serious contrast between Luigi and his father began to develop, Luigi had discovered some notes revealing the existence of Stefanos extramarital relations. This later expressed itself, after her death, in the pages of the novella Colloqui con i personaggi in 1915. His romantic feelings for his cousin, initially looked upon with disfavour, were taken very seriously by Linas family. They demanded that Luigi abandon his studies and dedicate himself to the business so that he could immediately marry her. In 1886, during a vacation from school, Luigi went to visit the mines of Porto Empedocle. The marriage, which seemed imminent, was postponed, Pirandello then registered at the University of Palermo in the departments of Law and of Letters. The campus at Palermo, and above all the Department of Law, was the centre in those years of the vast movement which would evolve into the Fasci Siciliani. In 1887, having chosen the Department of Letters, he moved to Rome in order to continue his studies. When I arrived in Rome it was raining hard, it was time and I felt like my heart was being crushed. The desperate laugh, the manifestation of revenge for the disappointment undergone, inspired the bitter verses of his first collection of poems

23.
Joseph Heller
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Joseph Heller was an American author of novels, short stories, plays and screenplays. His best-known work is the novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, Heller was born on May 1,1923 in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents, Lena and Isaac Donald Heller, from Russia. Even as a child, he loved to write, as a teenager, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland and sent it to the New York Daily News, which rejected it. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the year working as a blacksmiths apprentice, a messenger boy. In 1942, at age 19, he joined the U. S. Army Air Corps, two years later he was sent to the Italian Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. His unit was the 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, Heller later remembered the war as fun in the beginning. You got the feeling there was something glorious about it. On his return home he felt like a hero, people think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs. After the war, Heller studied English at the University of Southern California, bill, graduating from the latter institution in 1948. In 1949, he received his M. A. in English from Columbia University, following his graduation from Columbia, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in St Catherines College, Oxford before teaching composition at Pennsylvania State University for two years. He then briefly worked for Time Inc. before taking a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. He was first published in 1948, when The Atlantic ran one of his short stories, the story nearly won the Atlantic First. He was married to Shirley Held from 1945 to 1981 and they had two children, Erica and Zelmo, while sitting at home one morning in 1953, Heller thought of the lines, It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, fell madly in love with him, within the next day, he began to envision the story that could result from this beginning, and invented the characters, the plot, and the tone that the story would eventually take. Within a week, he had finished the first chapter and sent it to his agent and he did not do any more writing for the next year, as he planned the rest of the story. The initial chapter was published in 1955 as Catch-18, in Issue 7 of New World Writing. Although he originally did not intend the story to be longer than a novelette, when he was one-third done with the work, his agent, Candida Donadio, sent it to publishers. Heller was not particularly attached to the work, and decided that he would not finish it if publishers were not interested, the work was soon purchased by Simon & Schuster, who gave him US $750 and promised him an additional $750 when the full manuscript was delivered

24.
Albert Camus
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Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as a follower of it, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations, No, Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. Camus was born in French Algeria to a Pied-Noir family and studied at the University of Algiers, in 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA. Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Dréan in French Algeria and his mother was of Spanish descent and could only hear out of her left ear. His father, Lucien, an agricultural worker of Alsatian descent, was wounded in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I. Lucien died from his wounds in an army hospital on 11 October. Camus and his mother, a house cleaner, lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers. In 1923, Camus was accepted into the Lycée Bugeaud and eventually was admitted to the University of Algiers, after he contracted tuberculosis in 1930, he had to end his football activities, he had been a goalkeeper for a prominent Algerian university team. In addition, he was able to study part-time. To earn money, he took odd jobs, as a tutor, car parts clerk. Camus joined the French Communist Party in early 1935, seeing it as a way to fight inequalities between Europeans and natives in Algeria. He did not suggest he was a Marxist or that he had read Das Kapital, in 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party was founded. Camus joined the activities of the Algerian Peoples Party, which got him into trouble with his Communist party comrades, Camus then became associated with the French anarchist movement. The anarchist André Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting in 1948 of the Cercle des Étudiants Anarchistes as a sympathiser familiar with anarchist thought, Camus wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La révolution Prolétarienne, and Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. Camus stood with the anarchists when they expressed support for the uprising of 1953 in East Germany and he again allied with the anarchists in 1956, first in support of the workers uprising in Poznań, Poland, and then later in the year with the Hungarian Revolution

25.
The Myth of Sisyphus
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The Myth of Sisyphus is a 1942 philosophical essay by Albert Camus. The English translation by Justin OBrien was first published in 1955, in the essay, Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd, mans futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Does the realization of the absurd require suicide and he then outlines several approaches to the absurd life. The essay concludes, The struggle itself is enough to fill a mans heart, the work can be seen in relation to other absurdist works by Camus, the novel The Stranger, the plays The Misunderstanding and Caligula, and especially the essay The Rebel. The essay is dedicated to Pascal Pia and is organized in four chapters and he begins by describing the absurd condition, life is meaningless and nonsensical, but humans strive constantly for meaning and sense in it. Once stripped of its common romanticism, the world is a foreign, strange, yet humans need meaning, even though it appears there is no meaning to be found. Science professes a sensible explanation of the world, but ends in fantastic stories of microscopic galaxies of atoms that cannot be seen and this is the absurd condition and from the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. He then characterizes a number of philosophies that describe and attempt to deal with this feeling of the absurd, by Heidegger, Jaspers, Shestov, Kierkegaard, and Husserl. For Camus, who set out to take the absurd seriously and follow it to its final conclusions, taking the absurd seriously means acknowledging the contradiction between the desire of human reason and the unreasonable world. Suicide, then, also must be rejected, without man, the contradiction must be lived, reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without false hope. However, the absurd can never be accepted, it requires constant confrontation, to embrace the absurd implies embracing all that the unreasonable world has to offer. Without a meaning in life, there is no scale of values, what counts is not the best living but the most living. Thus, Camus arrives at three consequences from fully acknowledging the absurd, revolt, freedom, and passion, Camus then goes on to present examples of the absurd life. He begins with Don Juan, the serial seducer who lives the life to the fullest. There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional, the next example is the actor, who depicts ephemeral lives for ephemeral fame. He demonstrates to what degree appearing creates being, in those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover. Camuss third example of the man is the conqueror, the warrior who forgoes all promises of eternity to affect. He chooses action over contemplation, aware of the fact that nothing can last, here Camus explores the absurd creator or artist

26.
Quietism (philosophy)
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Quietism in philosophy is an approach to the subject that sees the role of philosophy as broadly therapeutic or remedial. Pyrrhonism represents perhaps the earliest example of an identifiably quietist position in the West, sextus Empiricus regarded Pyrrhonism not as a nihilistic attack but rather as a form of philosophical therapy, The causal principle of scepticism we say is the hope of becoming tranquil. The chief constitutive principle of scepticism is the claim that to account an equal account is opposed, for it is from this, we think. Contemporary discussion of quietism can be traced back to Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Norman Malcolm, a friend of Wittgensteins, took a quietist approach to skeptical problems in the philosophy of mind. More recently, the philosophers John McDowell and Richard Rorty have taken explicitly quietist positions, ISBN 0-14-012482-9 Austin, J L. Sense and Sensibilia. “Pragmatism, Metaphysical Quietism and the Problem of Normativity, ” Philosophical Topics, ISBN 0-7100-3836-4 McDowell, John and Evans, Gareth

27.
Being and Nothingness
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Being and Nothingness, An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartres main purpose is to assert the individuals existence as prior to the individuals essence and his overriding concern in writing the book was to demonstrate that free will exists. While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heideggers Being and Time, reading Being and Time initiated Sartres own philosophical enquiry. Born into the reality of ones body, in a material universe. Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to them appear. Sartres existentialism shares its philosophical starting point with René Descartes, The first thing we can be aware of is our existence, in Nausea, the main characters feeling of dizziness towards his own existence is induced by things, not thinking. This dizziness occurs in the face of ones freedom and responsibility for giving a meaning to reality, as an important break with Descartes, Sartre rejects the primacy of knowledge, as summed up in the phrase Existence precedes essence and offers a different conception of knowledge and consciousness. Important ideas in Being and Nothingness build on Edmund Husserls phenomenology, to both philosophers, consciousness is intentional, meaning that there is only consciousness of something. For Sartre, intentionality implies that there is no form of self that is hidden inside consciousness, an ego must be a structure outside consciousness, so that there can be consciousness of the ego. Being and Nothingness is a reply to Martin Heideggers Being and Time, in which he addressed being in its own right and laid ground for Sartres thought. In the introduction, Sartre sketches his own theory of consciousness, being, based on an examination of the nature of phenomena, he describes the nature of two types of being, being-in-itself and being-for-itself. While being-in-itself is something that can only be approximated by human being, in the first chapter, Sartre develops a theory of nothingness which is central to the whole book, especially to his account for bad faith and freedom. For him, nothingness is not just a concept that sums up negative judgements such as Pierre is not here. Though it is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation, a concrete nothingness, e. g. not being able to see, is part of a totality, the life of the blind man in this world. This totality is modified by the nothingness which is part of it, in the totality of consciousness and phenomenon, both can be considered separately, but exist only as a whole. The human attitude of inquiry, of asking questions, puts consciousness at distance from the world, every question brings up the possibility of a negative answer, of non-being, e. g. For Sartre, this is how nothingness can exist at all, non-being can neither be part of the being-in-itself nor can it be as a complement of it. Being-for-itself is the origin of negation, the relation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself is one of questioning the latter

28.
Angst
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The word angst was introduced into English from the Danish, Norwegian and Dutch word angst and the German word Angst. It is attested since the 19th century in English translations of the works of Kierkegaard and it is used in English to describe an intense feeling of apprehension, anxiety, or inner turmoil. In common language, however, Angst is the word for fear. In other languages having the meaning of the Latin word pavor for fear, the word Angst has existed since the 8th century, from the Proto-Indo-European root *anghu-, restraint from which Old High German angust developed. It is pre-cognate with the Latin angustia, tensity, tightness and angor, choking, clogging, in Existentialist philosophy the term angst carries a specific conceptual meaning. The use of the term was first attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard used the word Angest to describe a profound and deep-seated condition. Where animals are guided solely by instinct, said Kierkegaard, human beings enjoy a freedom of choice that we find both appealing and terrifying. Existential angst makes its appearance in musical composition in the early twentieth century as a result of both philosophical developments and as a reflection of the war-torn times. Angst began to be discussed in reference to music in the mid- to late 1950s amid widespread concerns over international tensions. Jeff Nuttalls book Bomb Culture traced angst in popular culture to Hiroshima, dread was expressed in works of folk rock such as Bob Dylans Masters of War and A Hard Rains a-Gonna Fall. The term often makes an appearance in reference to rock, grunge, nu metal. The dictionary definition of angst at Wiktionary

29.
Liberty
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Liberty, in philosophy, involves free will as contrasted with determinism. In politics, liberty consists of the social and political freedoms to all community members are entitled. In theology, liberty is freedom from the effects of sin, spiritual servitude, as such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others. Philosophers from earliest times have considered the question of liberty, according to Thomas Hobbes, a free man is he that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do. John Locke rejected that definition of liberty, while not specifically mentioning Hobbes, he attacks Sir Robert Filmer who had the same definition. According to Locke, In the state of nature, liberty consists of being free from any power on Earth. People are not under the will or lawmaking authority of others but have only the law of nature for their rule, in political society, liberty consists of being under no other lawmaking power except that established by consent in the commonwealth. People are free from the dominion of any will or legal restraint apart from that enacted by their own constituted lawmaking power according to the trust put in it. Thus, freedom is not as Sir Robert Filmer defines it, A liberty for everyone to do what he likes, to live as he pleases, freedom is constrained by laws in both the state of nature and political society. Freedom of nature is to be no other restraint but the law of nature. Freedom of people under government is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society and made by the lawmaking power established in it. Persons have a right or liberty to follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others. John Stuart Mill, in his work, On Liberty, was the first to recognize the difference between liberty as the freedom to act and liberty as the absence of coercion, the modern concept of political liberty has its origins in the Greek concepts of freedom and slavery. To be free, to the Greeks, was to not have a master and that was the original Greek concept of freedom. It is closely linked with the concept of democracy, as Aristotle put it, This, another is that a man should live as he likes. This, they say, is the privilege of a freeman, since, on the other hand and this applied only to free men. In Athens, for instance, women could not vote or hold office and were legally and socially dependent on a male relative, the populations of the Persian Empire enjoyed some degree of freedom. Citizens of all religions and ethnic groups were given the rights and had the same freedom of religion, women had the same rights as men

30.
Determinism
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Determinism is the philosophical position that for every event there exist conditions that could cause no other event. There are many determinisms, depending on what pre-conditions are considered to be determinative of an event or action, deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have sprung from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and considerations. Some forms of determinism can be tested with ideas from physics. The opposite of determinism is some kind of indeterminism, Determinism is often contrasted with free will. Determinism often is taken to mean causal determinism, which in physics is known as cause-and-effect and it is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state is completely determined by prior states. This meaning can be distinguished from varieties of determinism mentioned below. Numerous historical debates involve many philosophical positions and varieties of determinism and they include debates concerning determinism and free will, technically denoted as compatibilistic and incompatibilistic. Determinism should not be confused with self-determination of human actions by reasons, motives, Determinism rarely requires that perfect prediction be practically possible. However, causal determinism is a broad term to consider that ones deliberations, choices. Causal determinism proposes that there is a chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. The relation between events may not be specified, nor the origin of that universe, causal determinists believe that there is nothing in the universe that is uncaused or self-caused. Historical determinism can also be synonymous with causal determinism, causal determinism has also been considered more generally as the idea that everything that happens or exists is caused by antecedent conditions. Yet they can also be considered metaphysical of origin. Nomological determinism is the most common form of causal determinism and it is the notion that the past and the present dictate the future entirely and necessarily by rigid natural laws, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events. Quantum mechanics and various interpretations thereof pose a challenge to this view. Nomological determinism is sometimes illustrated by the experiment of Laplaces demon. Nomological determinism is sometimes called scientific determinism, although that is a misnomer, physical determinism is generally used synonymously with nomological determinism. Necessitarianism is closely related to the causal determinism described above and it is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility, there is exactly one way for the world to be. Leucippus claimed there were no uncaused events, and that occurs for a reason

31.
Waiting staff
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Waiting staff are those who work at a restaurant or a bar, and sometimes in private homes, attending customers—supplying them with food and drink as requested. A server or waiting staff takes on an important role in a restaurant which is to always be attentive. Each waiter follows rules and guidelines that are developed by the manager, wait staff can abide by this rule by completing many different tasks throughout his or her shift. Such as food-running, polishing dishes and silverware, helping bus tables, waiting on tables is part of the service sector, and among the most common occupations in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that, as of May 2008, many restaurants choose a specific uniform for their wait staff to wear. Waitstaff may receive tips as a minor or major part of their earnings, archaic terms such as serving girl, serving wench, or serving lad are generally used only within their historical context. The duties a waiter, wait staff or server partakes in can be tedious, in some higher-end restaurants, servers have a good knowledge of the wine list and can recommend food-wine pairings. At more expensive restaurants, servers memorize the ingredient list for the dishes, for example, if the menu lists marinated beef, the customer might ask what the beef is marinated in, for how long, and what cut of beef is used in the dish. Silver service staff are trained to serve at banquets or high-end restaurants. These servers follow specific rules and service guidelines which makes it a skilled job and they generally wear black and white with a long, white apron. The head server is in charge of the staff, and is also frequently responsible for assigning seating. The head server must insure that all staff does their duties accordingly, the functions of a head server can overlap to some degree with that of the Maître dhôtel. Emotional labour is required by waiting staff, particularly at many high-class restaurants. Restaurant serving positions require on the job training that would be held by an upper level server in the restaurant, the server will be trained to provide good customer service, learn food items and drinks and maintain a neat and tidy appearance. Working, in a such as captain, in a top rated restaurant requires disciplined role-playing comparable to a theater performance. Individuals employed to handle food and beverages in the United States must obtain a food handlers card or permit, servers that do not have a permit or handlers card can not serve. The server can achieve a permit or handlers card online, no food certification requirements are needed in Canada. However, to alcoholic beverages in Canada servers must undergo their provinces online training course within a month of being hired

32.
Other (philosophy)
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The condition and quality of Otherness, the characteristics of the Other, is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self. Therefore, the imposition of Otherness alienates the labelled person from the centre of society, the term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling a person as someone who belongs to a subordinate social category defined as the Other. The practice of Othering is the exclusion of persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, see, The Phenomenology of Spirit Edmund Husserl applied the concept of the Other as a basis for intersubjectivity, the psychological relations among people. In Cartesian Meditations, An Introduction to Phenomenology, Husserl said that the Other is constituted as an alter ego, as such, the Other person posed and was an epistemological problem—of being only a perception of the consciousness of the Self. The Other appears as a phenomenon in the course of a persons life. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the Ethical philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas established the contemporary definitions, usages, Lacan associated the Other with language and with the symbolic order of things. Lévinas associated the Other with the metaphysics of scripture and tradition. In the event, Lévinas re-formulated the face-to-face encounter to include the propositions of Jacques Derrida about the impossibility of the Other being an entirely metaphysical pure-presence. That the Other could be an entity of pure Otherness personified in a created and depicted with language that identifies, describes. In the psychology of the mind, the Other identifies and refers to the mind, to silence, to insanity. Nonetheless, in such psychologic and analytic usages, there arise a tendency to relativism if the Other person leads to ignoring the commonality of truth. Likewise, problems arise from unethical usages of the terms The Other, Otherness, and Othering to reinforce ontological divisions of reality, of being, of becoming, and of existence. As a challenge to self-assurance, the existence of the Other is a matter of ethics and that logical problem has especially negative consequences in the realm of human geography when the Other person is denied ethical priority in geopolitical discourse. In The Colonial Present, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, the geographer Derek Gregory said that the responses of U. S. President George W. S. populace Why do they hate us, as political prelude to the War on Terror. President Bushs rhetorical question led the U. S. populace to make an artificial, in the imperialist world system, political and economic affairs were fragmented, and the discrete empires provided for most of their own needs. Their influence solely through conquest or the threat of conquest, in 1951, the United Nations officially declared that the differences among the races were insignificant in relation to the anthropological sameness among the peoples who are the human race. As such, a colony is a way to dominate and dispose of two groups of people who can be used to define the Other. The dehumanisation of colonialism—the colonist Self against the colonised Other—is maintained with the false binary-relations of social class and race, of sex and gender, and of nation and religion

When Michael (Mikael) Kierkegaard died on 9 August 1838 Søren had lost both his parents and all his brothers and sisters except for Peter who later became Bishop of Aalborg in the Danish State Lutheran Church.

The Magna Carta (originally known as the Charter of Liberties) of 1215, written in iron gall ink on parchment in medieval Latin, using standard abbreviations of the period. This document is held at the British Library and is identified as "British Library Cotton MS Augustus II.106".

A romanticised 19th-century recreation of King John signing the Magna Carta

The idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel introduced the concept of the Other as constituent part of human preoccupation with the Self.

The ethical philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas associated the concept of the Other with the ethical systems proposed in scripture and tradition.

Scientific racism of the Other: In the late-19th century, H. Strickland Constable justified anti-Irish racism among white people by claiming similarity between the cranial features of "the Irish-Iberian" man (left) and "the Negro" man (right), as proof that each man is racially inferior to the Anglo-Teutonic man (centre) possessed of the cranial ideal.